


January 1st, 1950

by amour_de_tous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Agent Carter References, Alternate Universe, Bucky Barnes Lives, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-27 03:17:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18295745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amour_de_tous/pseuds/amour_de_tous
Summary: It's New Years Day, 1950. Bucky, rescued from the bottom of a ravine, has been living his life in Brooklyn for the past five years, just trying to do his best to move on. Peggy Carter has been doing the same. Somewhere along the line, they learned to lean on one another, and now, at the start of a new decade, Bucky takes a moment to reflect before the start of something new.





	January 1st, 1950

**Author's Note:**

> So...sometimes you write the fanfic you wanna see in the world, I guess. Do I actually ship Bucky and Peggy? I do not. Do I think there is a lot of potential for sadness there? Heck yeah I do. Find me on tumblr at amour-de-tous.tumblr.com if you wanna cry about Bucky surviving the war, what a tragic bean he'd be over Steve's death, or the fact that we've never actually seen Peggy's husband so *shrug emoji*.

He’d missed Steve’s last words.  
  
That part had hung on him, heavy, for years. Almost as heavy as missing the plane had. He should have been on it, with Steve. Should have stopped Steve from getting on it. Would have made Steve nosedive the plane and then jump, or—something. They were both super soldiers, they’d survive it. But he hadn’t; Steve hadn’t. Bucky’d been caught clearing a separate part of the compound when Steve had gotten on the _Valkyrie_ , and he’d been on his way back to the control room where they'd all been called, when Steve's plane had gone down. It was Peggy who spoke the last words Steve Rogers ever heard; and now, five years on, Bucky can appreciate that. She didn't cuss him out or threaten him or even tell him he was being a _fucking miserable sonovabitch, Rogers_ for leaving him behind; all things Bucky's pretty sure he'd have said, so it was alright. It was okay to hear Steve's last words from Peggy, not from Steve, even if it’d been the hardest thing he’d ever have to hear. The hardest thing he’d ever had to do was attend the state funeral. The private one hadn’t been so bad, where the people who knew him and loved him had been. It was easier to lose himself in the grief of others, then.    
  
He and Peggy had gone to the Stork Club a week next Saturday; they'd sat at a table all dolled up in their best duds; when 9pm sharp hit, they left the Stork and went to a seedy bar. They'd drunk until Peggy had almost fallen off her stool and Bucky was stone-cold-sober, and then they'd left without dancing one dance and gone back to a hotel room where they'd had separate rooms and stayed in one, anyway. Nothing had happened; she'd been out cold before his tie was off, and even if she hadn't been, nothing would have happened anyway. They both had their grief to deal with, in their own ways, and if they leaned on one another through it, well, everyone thought that was just alright. Steve's best friend and Steve's best girl, helping hold one another up when they both wanted to fall down.  
  
They won the war. Like everyone else, they wept and prayed on V-E day. On V-J day, they wept and prayed again. He and the Commandos had a drink, they poured one out for Steve. Bucky went back to Brooklyn; he sorted through Steve's effects, he donated Steve's clothes--now several sizes too small to fit, anyhow--and kept the rest, carefully locked up in a room he didn't open. He got a post-war job as an engineer thanks to the GI bill. He worked there three months before Peggy Carter showed up and said ‘ _There's something going on and Howard and I...We're investigating. We'd like you to be part of it._ '  
  
He was there when Peggy discovered they had Steve's blood; his hand was on hers when they poured it into the Hudson. After, her hand was on his when he finally found out just how much booze it took to get him well and truly schnockered (the answer was surprising, even to Howard, who hadn’t thought Zola’d gotten so close to Erskine’s formula). He quit his job and joined the SSR; James Barnes might have come home from the war, but Bucky would never be a civilian again, no matter how he’d wanted to be just that.  
  
Time passed, as it does, no matter how often you visit a little headstone next to Sarah and Joseph Rogers that’s situated over a grave with no body in it. He started out yelling at Steve and ended up crying. Not at first. It took months before he was done being angry enough that he cried about Steve Rogers; and when he finally did, he felt like he’d never stop, he felt like the war all over again, like there’d never be a time he wasn’t crying. Just like the war, there came a day when he realized he hadn’t cried over Steve in days, and that was, maybe, when he began to heal. Howard found Steve’s shield, but not the _Valkyrie_. It came home to sit in the same room as all of Steve’s effects; the Army had tried to take it, and then the SSR, and Howard Stark made a legal case as to how he owned it and it’d been on loan to Steve Rogers, not to Captain America. Since the Army owned the latter but not the former, Howard had sent it along to Bucky.  
  
Sometime in the five years since Steve’s death tore him apart, since he had to crawl back to the living feeling like he’d landed on a live grenade, Bucky had learned to live with the pain behind his ribs that was the absence of Steve in his life. He still sucked in a breath when he saw a short blond fella; or a tall one, at that. He still found himself reading something in the paper and laughing, calling out ' _hey, Steve, listen to this’_ before silence met him and reality came down hard. It didn’t cut him to the quick the same, anymore, so much as it just flared the dull aching he’d learned to live with like Sousa’s limp, like Thompson’s attitude, like Howard drunkenness. They all dealt with the war in their own way.  
  
He and Peggy found their way, after a while. It surprised no one as much as themselves, but then, his family certainly hadn’t had any trouble figuring out when he liked a dame, even back in the ‘30s, so they’d seen it a mile away; long before Peggy had leaned over and kissed him, startling the both of them he suspects, but himself the most. When he’d kissed her back, he’s not sure who was more surprised, but one thing lead to another and here they are.  
  
Once upon a time, an evening like tonight would stretch out heavy and pained; a reminder of who wasn't here, with or for either of them. They'd loved him, each in their own way, and both had lost him; one a brother and one something more. It had taken far longer to come to terms with the guilt of moving on without him than it had to fall for one another. It had been Peggy who had righted the situation (because of course it was), who had told him in no uncertain terms that Steve Rogers would never have wanted either of them to languish or wallow or be alone forever. Dignity of his choice, and all.  
  
Things had gotten easier, if not  _easy_ , after that. They've had a couple years of real happiness, he thinks; the kind of thing he'd always dreamt of when he was younger. The circumstances were different, of course, but the happiness was real, even as it was tinged with sadness now and then. He still found himself sizing up every cute girl he met, wondering if she'd go out with a short blond fella, but a lifetime of ingrained habit takes a while to overcome, he reckons.  
  
January 1st, 1950. A new year, a new _decade_ , and the both of them grateful to see the last of the ‘40s out. In his mind, the only good the ‘40s had to offer was that the two of them met; the rest of it could go right to hell, and don’t mind the door on it’s way out. He’d thought about this, about doing it at Christmas, but decided he’d wait until they waved goodbye to the decade that had brought with it so much heartache and pain. The ‘50s were a clean start; for themselves as well as everyone else. When better to start a new chapter of their lives, then at the start of a decade not already tainted by the horrors of war?  
  
He shouldn't be nervous; he knows she loves him, knows that the ghost between them is a friendly sort, but still he finds his palms sweaty. He'd stormed beaches and looked through the scope of a rifle, he’d seen his best friend in an impossible place with an impossible body, and seen the devil peel off his face. He'd been strapped down and tortured, turned into something somewhere between the impossible and the devil. He’d nearly fallen off a train only to be saved at the very last second (again), and then gone on unable to repay the favour on a plane when it was needed. But still, none of that, the blood, the war, the fear, none of it made him feel any more prepared for what was to come.  
  
So that’s how he finds himself, not at his parents for New Years dinner like he normally would be, but sitting at the kitchen table where he and Steve had shared many a breakfasts, over a dinner his Mama had helped him to prepare for the woman he loved more than anyone on this Earth. There’d be candles if he thought Peggy wouldn’t sock him for something so cheesy, but there is a lovely chocolate cake, and in his pocket a little box, and that’ll be enough, won’t it?  
  
It took them time to find their place in a world without Steve Rogers in it, and it only stood to reason that they might find their place together, even without the magnet that had once brought them into orbit around one another. He would ask, and she would say yes, he had no doubt of it (one didn’t ask a woman a question like that if you weren’t already certain of her answer). They’d settle in New York, but not in this apartment filled with ghosts, and maybe he’d be father to children that, in another life, he’d have been godfather to. He’d still wake to nightmares, and so would she, but they’d been getting less and would continue to do so until those, too, were just shadows in a past filled with them.  
  
There were fewer shadows and more light, now, even with working at the SSR (he’s considered retiring; he gave the war several good years, and the SSR--now S.H.I.E.L.D.--five more. He’s got a college education, and engineering doesn’t require quite so much secrecy, but he'll stay as long as Peggy does. He already failed to watch Steve's six when it mattered).  
  
There are more days now where he thinks ' _how did I get so lucky?’_ instead of ‘ _how did I lose so much_ ’, and that’s progress, too. When he fingers the little box in his pocket, it’s just happiness he feels, no sadness clouding it, and that’s how he knows it’s time.  
  
“Peggy,” he starts, smiling at her across the table. “There’s somethin’ I wanna ask you.”


End file.
